Valve issued a video demonstrating its Steam Controller today. The game pad, which features two track pads in lieu of joysticks, is used for its series of Steam Machines, announced in September.
Looks good.
We set out with a singular goal: bring the Steam experience, in its entirety, into the living-room. We knew how to build the user interface, we knew how to build a machine, and even an operating system. But that still left input - our biggest missing link. We realized early on that our goals required a new kind of input technology - one that could bridge the gap from the desk to the living room without compromises. So we spent a year experimenting with new approaches to input and we now believe we've arrived at something worth sharing and testing with you.
Where Microsoft and Sony show zero innovation with the Xbox One and the PS4, Valve is the one pushing limits. Their controller is quite, quite unique, and has a whole different approach than what we've seen before - instead of two inaccurate joysticks, it has two super-precise touchpads with advanced haptic feedback and the ability for both absolute and relative positioning. Go read the description - a summary won't do it justice. And, as always: hackable. Yes, even the controller is open and hackable. Wow.
They're on the right track here. If I were Microsoft or Sony, I'd start getting worried.
Entertainment is not a one-size-fits-all world. We want you to be able to choose the hardware that makes sense for you, so we are working with multiple partners to bring a variety of Steam gaming machines to market during 2014, all of them running SteamOS.
Where Sony and Microsoft follow the iOS model for consoles, Valve is aiming for the Android model, including Valve's own line of 'Nexus' devices. As Valves notes, no restrictions - you can change the hardware, software, and install any operating system you want. The right approach, obviously.
The cooperation between Valve and NVIDIA is quite close, as NVIDIA details on its blog:
Engineers from Valve and NVIDIA have spent a lot of time collaborating on a common goal for SteamOS: to deliver an open-platform gaming experience with superior performance and uncompromising visuals directly on the big screen.
NVIDIA engineers embedded at Valve collaborated on improving driver performance for OpenGL; optimizing performance on NVIDIA GPUs; and helping to port Valve's award-winning content library to SteamOS; and tuning SteamOS to lower latency, or lag, between the controller and onscreen action.
This is going to be big. After being defeated in mobile, it seems Microsoft is facing another frontal assault on another one of its strongholds: gaming, whether it be Windows or Xbox.
As we've been working on bringing Steam to the living room, we've come to the conclusion that the environment best suited to delivering value to customers is an operating system built around Steam itself. SteamOS combines the rock-solid architecture of Linux with a gaming experience built for the big screen. It will be available soon as a free stand-alone operating system for living room machines.
Valve goes beyond just building a Linux distribution and grafting Steam on top of it. They are actually working very closely with hardware manufacturers and game developers, which has already resulted in graphics performance improvements. They are also working on reducing input latency as well as audio performance. In other words, they are very serious about upending Windows as the default PC gaming operating system.
In SteamOS, we have achieved significant performance increases in graphics processing, and we're now targeting audio performance and reductions in input latency at the operating system level. Game developers are already taking advantage of these gains as they target SteamOS for their new releases.
Valve also unveiled that it's working with the major game developers so that triple-A titles will be natively available on SteamOS. As for your existing Windows games - SteamOS will support game streaming from your existing PC so you can play them on your SteamOS machine in the living room (or anywhere else, of course). 'Hundreds of great games' are already available natively on Linux through Steam, too.
This is just the first in a series of three announcements, and it stands to reason that the second one will be a dedicated SteamOS machine from Valve. The third announcement? Well. It's got a three in it, so Half-Life 3 is pretty much confirmed.
Gabe Newell, the co-founder and managing director of Valve, said today that Linux is the future of gaming despite the minuscule share of the market it has today.
That seems hard to believe, given that Newell acknowledged Linux gaming generally accounts for less than one percent of the market by any measure including players, player minutes, and revenue. But Valve is going to do its best to make sure Linux becomes the future of gaming by extending its Steam distribution platform to hardware designed for living rooms.
"Half-Life 3 - SteamBox/Linux exclusive". There, chicken and egg problem solved.
Steam Family Sharing allows close friends and family members to play one another's games while earning their own Steam achievements and saving their own game progress to the Steam cloud. It's all enabled by authorizing a shared computer.
Sounds neat, but it does look convoluted and complex. I have a simpler system, which is quite revolutionary. It's called physical copies and I can just give them to friends. It's magic.
The new Nintendo 2DS system gives you all the features of the Nintendo 3DS and Nintendo 3DS XL, minus 3D viewing. And the price makes the world of Nintendo games even more accessible.
Curiously enough, the 2DS actually has only one screen - it's divided in two by the casing. The entire screen is touch-capable, but the top screen is covered by plastic so you can't touch it there. Like the Wii U's controller, this thing just looks weird and unwieldily, and while the price is nice, I doubt it will turn Nintendo's fortunes around.
Imagine a phone and/or tablet designed and built by Nintendo, with a proper integrated gamepad, capable of output to external displays, with access to Nintendo's entire back catalog of games - from the NES, through the Game Boy, SNES, Nintendo64, GameCube, DS, and Wii (if compatible with non-motion controls). Of course, new games can be published as well.
Nintendo should not be making yet another device to carry aside from your phone. They should be making a phone.
I was recently talking to Notch in a TF2 livestream and asked him about his future aspirations of 0x10c. Although he seemed in a bad mood, he said: "Nope, their are no future aspirations for 0x10c. I'm going to make small games for the rest of my life. If someone on the office wants to carry it on they can." Well, at least now we have the final word from Notch. I thought it was just on ice, I'm very disappointed.
I don't envy Notch. Minecraft's success is virtually impossible to top, and no matter how awesome and perfect 0x10c would have been, it would have always been compared unfavourably to Minecraft. He could not have won here.
Continuation efforts are already under way, but I'm not keeping my hopes up. In the meantime, there's rymdkapsel for a very watered down (but awesome!) mobile experience, and there's Starmade for those who want Minecraft in space.
Our priority is ensuring our customers get the best Xbox One experience the first day it is available. To do that, and in order to meet demand, we have adjusted the number of markets that will receive Xbox One in November to 13 markets, including Australia, Austria, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Mexico, Spain, United Kingdom, United States and New Zealand, in November.
We remain committed to launching Xbox One in Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Netherlands, Norway, Russia, Sweden, Switzerland, as soon as possible in 2014.
And now delays. Microsoft on a roll.
That said, like online, the console will still function if Kinect isn’t plugged in, although you won’t be able to use any feature or experience that explicitly uses the sensor.
The Xbox One used to require Kinect. Now it doesn't. Good move, obviously, but it does raise the question: whatever the hell was this company thinking? Microsoft really seems to have lost all its marbles - Windows 8, Windows Phone, and now Xbox One. Messy, messy, messy.
To put the 160000 figure in perspective - Microsoft sold 140000 Xbox 360s in just the US, in June alone, and that's after a sharp sales drop, for a console that's 8 years old. Nintendo is not doing well.
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